Expert Articles - Website Language

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) 

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is an online marketing process that is becoming more and more important as the Internet continues to increase its reach. But what exactly is SEO?

Have you ever wondered, while researching your favourite recipe or the latest news on a search engine, why some websites are lucky enough to be placed at the top of the page and immediately catch your eye, while others disappear in the multitudes of web links, hidden from everyone? The answer is simple: SEO.

SEO helps a website or web page make it to the top results in search engines. Contrary to most marketing tools, SEO is not an outbound kind of marketing, but an inbound one: SEO does not help to find customers, but instead to be found by customers.

The higher the website is ranked, the more visitors it gets, that is to say the more potential customers it brings, hence bringing in more profits. Some SEO companies even claim that they are able to provide their clients with an average return on investment (ROI) of more than 2,000% thanks to an effective SEO, meaning that for each dollar spent on the SEO, the company owning the website makes 20 dollars. Now we can understand why SEO is so important!

In order to conduct a successful “SEO campaign”, a webmaster has to define the product’s target audience, know what this audience will search for and type, as well as understand how the search engine ranking works. The webmaster will try to optimize the online material for search engines, that is to say, render it “search engine friendly”.

Search Engine Friendly Keywords in English and Spanish

One way to make the material “search engine friendly” is to use keywords that will be used on the website and will correspond to what customers are typing, thus bringing more online visitors. But it is not as easy as it looks: there are keywords with high or low search volume, that is to say some that are searched more often than others, and yet, opting for the most popular ones is not necessarily the best choice. While it seems natural that the best keyword for an IT firm should be “computer” or “laptop”, it is a keyword that shares too much competition and will hence offer a lesser ROI than a better targeted, lower volume one.

Translation from English to Spanish for SEO campaigns

SEO can also help dramatically expand a market by targeting a new population of Internet users. Recently, a major trend is to carry out “Spanish SEO campaigns”, aiming at attracting Hispanics and Latinos to websites. Indeed, non-English speaking online users account for 70% of the total online population and Spanish is the third most spoken language on the web at 8.52%. Internet spending has increased by 6 % in Hispanics’ and Latinos’ households, a fact that has caught the attention of search engines such as Google, as indicated in a recent speech by John Farell, the General Manager of Google Mexico:

“There are 46 million US Hispanics, and 30 million are online. They have about a trillion dollars in purchasing power, making it a customer segment marketers can’t ignore.”

It is easy to see why translation and SEO are closely related: an SEO campaign aiming at localizing a website and targeting a new market in a new language cannot be successful without collaborating with a translation agency that will not only translate the keywords, but also provide useful cultural advice.

The Web as a Text-Based Medium

Written text is a very important means of communication on the Internet. Websites without a written word are very rare, even impossible (if you consider the URL as being part of the website).

The Internet has been at the origin of a revival of written forms of communication. Text is to be found everywhere on a web page: in the core of it (the message), in navigation tools (menus, links, banners, etc.) and even hidden in the programming code, which generally does not appear on the screen.

Email Texts and Translations

E-mail has become the primary medium for communication in business (even if phone calls are still favored in some circumstances). Users find e-mailing functional because it is easy and quick, and because it does not require an immediate response from the recipient. Also, it has far more potential than telephone communication (attached files, links, multiple recipients, etc). Prompt email response to your customer needs is essential and with our help can be done in English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and other languages.

Twitter Postings in English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic

Some social platforms such as Twitter have created a new writing format by limiting the length of posts (140 character maximum) and allowing references to other users (@lingostar). However, this is not the only effect the Internet has had on the written word. In fact, some blogs showcase a lot of quality writing. Also, since a website is often the most important marketing tool for a company, institution or governmental organization, it must be perfect from a linguistic point of view. Much effort is put into the content’s style, grammar and spelling. It may be challenging to make Twitter postings in English, let alone Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic or other languages. 

English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Korean Keywords for Your Website

Due to the Internet, words have acquired a great commercial importance. For example, they are used as keywords that help to reference a web page. These keywords will then be chosen by the user when he uses a search engine. They are also used as tags to classify articles within a blog. Another important use is on online shopping sites, especially when it comes to defining categories in a directory or tagging a product. Even if most users access websites through bookmarks or search engines, the choice of a URL remains a crucial investment for a commercial website. These are a few reasons why major websites often hire linguists to optimize their presence on the Web. Those linguists may be asked to work in English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Korean and other languages. 

Professional Translators for Website Translation & Localization

The World Wide Web is used by people from many different countries, and it is no surprise that translation on the Web has become a major business. A lot of websites are translated by professional translators, but the Internet is also increasingly seen as a very good application for machine translation (MT). A lot of progress has been made in the past years and portals and web browsers often offer immediate MT services to their users. Such software can help with grasping the meaning of a short text, and it can even work quite well for some very specific types of texts (such as weather reports, for example). But most of the time, the results are unsatisfactory. Man still has a role to play, whether it means pre-editing (anticipating the software’s behavior and arranging the source text according to it) or post-editing (making the machine translation a proper text from a linguistic and stylistic point of view).

Web Content Writing in English, Spanish, French and Other Languages

Beyond these surface changes, there are more unconscious evolutions going on. The link between texts on the Internet is far more obvious than for printed text, considering that direct links are often embedded right into the text. As users of the Internet, we are conscious that the number of texts we could find on any one subject is virtually unlimited. This abundance and the fact that they appear and are replaced so fast, added to the anonymity of the Internet (we rarely know who the author is) make the information contained in the texts appear less trustworthy than if they were found in print. Therefore, building credibility on the Internet is a major concern for Web content writers.

Also, a webpage is read in a different manner than a sheet of paper. The user does not always read the content, but just scans it. It has been shown that very little of the text on a web page is actually read and that the eyes often follow the same F-shaped directional pattern. Therefore, it is important to locate keywords strategically on the page (at the top left corner especially). To attract and keep the user’s attention as long as possible, it is also efficient to emphasize keywords, to use lists and paragraphs, to write short texts and to stick to a simplified, factual style.

There is still a lot of resistance towards reading whole books or novels on-screen despite the recent improvements in this field. Electronic paper has a contrast very close if not equal to that created by the reflection of light on traditional paper. 

The last couple of decades have seen the emergence of new forms of art (especially literature) using features of the Web. Even though they are given more and more academic attention, they remain quite marginal and unknown to the general public.